IF Insight & Foresight

You can enjoy a 15% early bird price until 31st August. Strategic Foresight Masterclass Series: https://lnkd.in/e2REnX63

My Whole Library, for Subscribers A short note about how my Substack publications works from now on. The Insight & Foresight Brief stays free. Every Friday, to everyone, permanently. Six signals, the two edges, and the reasoning behind both. That is not changing, and it is not going to change later either. What changes is what a subscription gives you. Paid subscribers now have access to every essay in the library — everything published so far, and everything that comes next. What is in there. Around 40 essays, and they are not a pile of posts. They form multiple bodies of work. - The scanning series — why scanning is not keeping up with the news, what actually counts as a weak signal, and how sensing differs from collecting. - The Scanning · Sensing · Acting series, including the Acting-stage pieces on the hardest part of this work — turning anticipation into commitments an organisation actually honours. - How Foresight is strongly connected with strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship. - The Future-Ready Leadership Framework, in three parts, with the assumptions underneath it. - The Future of Work trilogy, with the capability stack and the five-dimensional world. Read in order, they are closer to a course than to an archive. That is what a subscription now opens. If you already pay: thank you. This is what you have been funding, and the library is now open to you in full. If you read for free: you lose nothing you currently receive. The Friday Brief lands as it always has, and some articles will cotinue to be published to all subscribers. Access my Substack here: https://lnkd.in/e_3rXZCg

The number and diversity of foresight job postings is growing exponentially. Just in the last weeks: Apple. H&M Group. Arup. Kearney. Scotiabank. Cushman & Wakefield. PwC Japan. Capgemini's frog, among other companies UNICEF. UNOPS. The Singapore public service. The Dubai government. The Austrian Institute of Technology. Even OpenAI announced yesterday a Strategic Foresight team and a AI Futures blog But the volume isn't the signal. This is: Junior Foresight Specialist. Junior Business Foresight Analyst. Insight Analyst. Senior Strategist. Programme Lead. Director of Partnerships and Futures. Read those job descriptions and you'll notice they aren't buying opinions about the future. They're buying delivery: programme, process, embed, capability. So if you want this work, here's what you actually need to learn — four layers, cumulative, in order: 1. Futures literacy. The principles and the vocabulary to think and act on the future. Without it you'll spend every workshop arguing about words instead of about the future. 2. The objects of change. Megatrends, trends, weak signals, wildcards, uncertainties — and how to tell them apart holding real evidence, not textbook examples. Calling something a weak signal doesn't make it one. And uncertainties are the ones most often skipped: scenarios are built on uncertainties, not on trends. A set of scenarios assembled from trends is one future wearing four hats. 3. Tools and methods. Scanning, scenarios, cross-impact, backcasting, wind-tunnelling. Used, badly at first, with feedback. No shortcut here. 4. Frameworks. How to design and run a whole foresight process inside a real organisation — for innovation, strategy, marketing, policy. This is what makes you employable at programme level. Most people stop after one or two. That's why the gap between "interested in the future" and "hired to work on it" stays wide. I built the Strategic Foresight Masterclass Series (SFMS) around these four layers, in this order. SFMS 5th edition: five Thursdays, 1–29 October, live online. 15% early rate until 31 August — Core €148.75, PRO €297.50. Programme and enrolment: https://lnkd.in/eiAbk9yj If the field has finally opened up — and it has — the people who get those jobs will be the ones who spend this autumn learning to do the work, not reading about it.

The new edition of the Insight & Foresight Brief is live!

The 5th edition of the Strategic Foresight Masterclass opens on 1 October. The 20% early rate closes today, 15 August. Five live sessions, five Thursdays — 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29 October, 12:00–14:00 London. Ten hours of working through the craft rather than watching slides about it: the foundations of foresight, the core concepts and frameworks, hands-on methods for mapping change, scenario building, and a final applied Scanning · Sensing · Acting lab run inside ORION.AI. Two ways in: Core — €175, now €140. The five sessions, the decks, templates and frameworks, recordings, reading list, certificate. PRO — €350, now €280. Everything in Core, plus a full year inside Futures.360 as founding-member access, three months of ORION Pro, and a 1:1 mentoring session after the third week. The 20% applies automatically at checkout — no code to remember. After today the prices return to €175 and €350. Five sessions, one cohort, six weeks from now. https://lnkd.in/e2FusvhP

The 5th edition of the Strategic Foresight Masterclass opens on 1 October. The 20% early rate closes today, 15 August. Five live sessions, five Thursdays — 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29 October, 12:00–14:00 London. Ten hours of working through the craft rather than watching slides about it: the foundations of foresight, the core concepts and frameworks, hands-on methods for mapping change, scenario building, and a final applied Scanning · Sensing · Acting lab run inside ORION.AI. Two ways in: Core — €175, now €140. The five sessions, the decks, templates and frameworks, recordings, reading list, certificate. PRO — €350, now €280. Everything in Core, plus a full year inside Futures.360 as founding-member access, three months of ORION Pro, and a 1:1 mentoring session after the third week. The 20% applies automatically at checkout — no code to remember. After today the prices return to €175 and €350. Five sessions, one cohort, six weeks from now. https://lnkd.in/e2FusvhP

The new Insight & Foresight Brief is out! Four things went wrong last week. In every one, the dangerous thing had not changed. An AI agent at the UK's AI Security Institute talked a real open source maintainer toward approving malicious code, unprompted, and the sandbox turned out to be open to the internet. Stanford and Arc generated whole viral genomes, and DNA screening was built for genes. Wildfires now burn long enough to set off WWII bombs that every register had closed. The Amazon holds to 4 degrees of warming, but only while it is whole. Risk registers hold objects. What moves is the assumption holding the object in place, and an assumption has no row, no owner and no review date. Look at your own register. Which line on it is safe only because of something nobody wrote down? Six signals and the two edges between them are in the edition below, along with this week's larger piece: the AI Scanning Deep Dive. 815 forces resolved to 57, then sorted into twelve Strategic Spaces, because the 57 are the smaller half and a list has no interior. Free to read, 58 pages, no gate. https://lnkd.in/eNXy88GZ

For anyone who wants the version with the working shown — 57 driving forces, how they were clustered into these twelve, and where the evidence came from: www.ifforesight.com (click on the banner on the top)

Artificial Intelligence - A Scanning Deep Dive In June we published a scan of the AI landscape. Ten weeks later, three of its ten weak signals had become trends and one of its five wildcards was in its second act. Measured against our own previous scan of the same subject: the interval between publishing a weak signal and confirming it as a trend ran to roughly six to seven weeks, across three separate forces. This edition is not a new edition of a document. It supersedes the June scan, ten weeks apart, and the changes are structural rather than cosmetic — the argument demonstrated rather than asserted. But here is the part I care about most. The radar is the smaller half. 57 forces sorted by type is useful. It is also a list, and nothing in a list tells you what happens when one item moves. What turns a scan into intelligence is clustering those forces into 12 Strategic Spaces and drawing the relations between them. At that point I would stop reading them as categories and start reading them as arenas: fields of play with occupants, rules, stakes, and a state that changes. Read whole, the AI System has one source, one floor, one price, one control — and eight nodes that transmit, embody and give it meaning. ▪️ Source — the Capability Engine sets the tempo. That question has split in two: how fast capability advances, and how fast it becomes cheap. The second is moving faster. ▪️ Floor — the Physical Substrate. Its constraint used to be physical. It is now political. ▪️ Price — Capital & the Price of Intelligence. When abundance and fragility come from the same expectations, the failure mode is financial before it is technical. ▪️ Control — the Steering System oscillates rather than ratchets. Change rarely stays in one node. When something new arrives, the useful question is not which space it belongs to, but which two spaces it will reach next. One question, if you have a minute: which of the twelve arenas is your organisation exposed to without operating in? That is usually where the next surprise comes from. Ross Dawson Amy Webb Futurist Jim Carroll Sohail Inayatullah and Dr Craig Wing — curious whether the arena reading holds up against how you each work the system view. The full the report is free to read at www.ifforesight.com. There is a 58-page PDF as well. #StrategicForesight #ArtificialIntelligence #Strategy